


Your Eyes Have Their Silence

by Siria



Category: Thoughtcrimes
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-03-24
Updated: 2007-03-24
Packaged: 2017-10-03 04:15:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brendan's still working when Freya falls asleep, twenty six hours of wakefulness catching up on her before they can make any more sense of what's going on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Eyes Have Their Silence

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to [Cate](http://sheafrotherdon.livejournal.com) for betaing.

Brendan's still working when Freya falls asleep, twenty six hours of wakefulness catching up on her before they can make any more sense of what's going on. Stacks of evidence surround them, dragged back from the office and spread out across her living room floor to make half a dozen obscene constellations: lists of names, of the dead; piles of eyewitness accounts where people take hundreds of words to say nothing at all; photos of arms and legs and hands, splayed and arranged in a parody of virtue, the bright slashes of lipstick across exposed stomachs.

When Freya sleeps, Brendan's waking thoughts follow her into her dreams. She's back in Brookridge, sitting and rocking herself quiet to the murmur of his words, runs down hallways while he looks for the order in someone else's madness. Freya and a young Brendan—shock of dark hair, skinny legs, gap-toothed grin—tumble down rabbit holes together, following trails of waxy red lipstick; an older Brendan is at the back of her tenth grade classroom with her, long legs squeezed behind a too-small desk, and his face has a solemn cast.

Mrs Chen asks her for an answer to a question she can't remember, a paper she didn't know she had to write, and Brendan's asking her questions, too, urgently, like he needs to know the answers; she can't answer them, she can't _understand_ him, and she knows that if she could, if she—but when she looks at him here, she can't understand what Brendan's thinking. He's a blank to her, his voice and his face carry no meaning, a cipher she can't understand, and that's what makes it most like a nightmare. Freya shifts, restlessly, and her legs become entangled, kicking against the blanket that Brendan threw over her at some awful-early hour of the morning.

* * *

Brendan doesn't sleep at all, and his thoughts keep her company all through the night, bring her back awake in the bright, white sunlight of a summer morning in the city. "Hello, sleepyhead," he says, twisting around to look at her. "Sleep well?" He's still sitting cross-legged on the floor, same as last night, but he's stripped down to undershirt and boxers, gained dark circles under his eyes and a jaw that's morning-stubble rough. The television's on, muted, switched from its habitual CNN news-crawl to the Cartoon Network. Shaggy and Scooby Doo are running from make-believe ghosts, and Brendan's eating a bowl of sugar-loaded cereal he must have scrounged from somewhere in the recesses of cupboards that she remembers to stock too rarely. His lower lip is flecked with drops of milk.

Freya makes no answer, just raises an eyebrow at him, and pushes up off the couch. She's sweaty and groggy, her mind the kind of cotton-wool mess that makes blocking harder—Brendan's thoughts are pushing faintly at the edge of her consciousness now, an tired, staticky jumble of _careFreyaconcerntiredtiredtiredfearfocus_—and she needs a shower, a change of clothes, the largest mug of coffee she's ever had in her life.

"What?" Brendan says. He's looking at her solemnly, head cocked to one side, but the Scooby Doo theme song is still running through his head, double-speed thanks to all the sugar in his system, and Freya has to fight hard not to hum it out loud. "Breakfast of champions."

"Sure," Freya says, voice as indulgent as five years with Brendan has taught it to be, and she stumbles down the hallway to the bathroom.

* * *

Harper always wants his progress reports first thing in the morning. Brendan's usually the first of the bunch, reports neatly typed and filed in triplicate before Harper's even stalked into the building with a large travel mug of strong coffee.

Brendan's late this morning, though, and the file he hands to Harper is slim: a progress report that details how they've made no real progress, just like the four reports that have come before it. Harper calls Brendan into his office at eleven. The conversation is brief, quiet, and Brendan doesn't slam the door on the way out, but Freya wouldn't have to be a telepath to see just how upset he is, how angry; the line of his shoulders is set, tense.

Brendan pulls out the DVDs of interviews with what few suspects they have, runs a hand over his face before he slides one into his computer and starts watching it for the millionth time. Freya knows it's useless; she's already sat in on interviews with all these people, conducted some of them herself. Even the ones who have some sort of innate blocking capability, or whose thought patterns are just too random, too scattered for her to catch hold of, don't fit the profile for whoever is doing this. She knows that, and she knows Brendan knows it.

_Don't even_, he thinks at Freya, a little viciously, without looking up at her. She doesn't flinch; she's had years to get used to just how stubborn he can be, how blunt when he's feeling frustrated and thinks there's nothing he can do to help. "I just," he says, then pauses, "Sometimes, there's more than one way to read a person, okay?"

"Okay," she says, and leaves him to it. She brushes a hand across his shoulder as she walks past, brushes her thoughts carefully against his—_gratitude_ and _Freya_ and _I shouldn't have snapped at her_ and beneath it all, the constant, constant recitation of names. _Tina, Jess, Chelsea, Molly, Elizabeth, Juanita, Maya_—the roll call of the dead, scattered haphazard across three continents, and Brendan never forgets a name, not one.

* * *

Come lunch-time, Freya's starving, and she knows Brendan is too, however much he might protest that he's busy, that he has work to do, he's fine. There's a good sushi place a couple of blocks away, and she drags him there, buys him the largest bento box she can find and sits over him until he's eaten, trying not to let her mouth twitch at the way that his appetite comes back to him, slowly at first and then all in a rush: there's a sudden flicker of _Hey, this California roll is pretty good_, and the rest of it's gone.

Freya has a flashback to the cafeteria in high school, the strange ability that teenage boys seemed to have—sit them down and they will make even the most disgusting plate of meatloaf vanish with lightning speed; she thinks it's probably the adult version of that which lets Brendan eat so quickly, and yet only end up with the smallest spot of wasabi on his tie.

She must have wrinkled her nose without realising it, because he's staring at her, eyebrow cocked, and she smiles. "I thought you might be hungry," she says.

"Why Agent McAllister," he drawls, "It's like you read my mind." He grins, mouth quirking up, a generous, lop-sided curl; she mocks him for spilling wasabi all over himself, and just like that, they're okay.

* * *

It's after seven; everyone else is leaving or has already left, and lights are slowly flicking off all across the office. Freya has almost managed to persuade Brendan to do likewise and get some sleep when the police department passes on an anonymous tip about a guy who was seen acting suspiciously around the time the most recent victim disappeared.

"They were going to dismiss it as a crank call," Brendan says as he pulls out of the parking lot, heading downtown as quick as they can through the evening traffic, "but they did a quick check-up just to be sure, and this guy's staying at a cheap hotel not too far away, fake name, paid in cash, _and_ guess where he told the reception clerk he'd just been on vacation?"

"Montréal," Freya says slowly, seeing the flicker-flare of images the word brings out in Brendan's mind—cobbled streets and French like a love song; the quiet of churches and falling rain; Marie-Joseph, seventy-eight, kneeling when found, the marks of lipstick on her cheek and throat like someone had loved her at the end. "You think this is him?"

"It fits, Freya," Brendan says, and his grip on the steering-wheel is so tight that his knuckles are white with it. "It fits, it has to be him."

* * *

When they get there, Mark Johannsen is gone.

"He checked out about half an hour ago," the clerk says. He's giving off a strange mixture of apathy and nervousness, the kind Freya's used to from people whose guilt has nothing to do with what she's interested in, but who feel nervous anyway. He stands in the doorway and watches while they search the hotel room, which is dingy and dark, but neat, a step or two above the usual rental-by-the hour places you normally get in this neighbourhood. Freya thinks if she looked in the bedside table, she'd find a Gideon Bible.

"He left nothing behind him?" she asks. "No forwarding address, no billing address?"

"No, nothing," the man—boy, really—says. Freya sees him think of _a man, non-descript, signing the register; neatly clipped nails, careful signature; 'Thank you', 'Have a nice day,' polite._

"Did he say anything about where he might be going next?" Brendan says, from over by the window. His voice is muffled—he's on his hands and knees, looking underneath the bed. The clerk does a double-take, but Freya just represses a smile; Brendan's never really been one for standing on his dignity.

"No," he says to Brendan's back. "Hey man, if I'd known you guys were looking for him, I'd've said something. Locked him in his room or something until you got here. I know some judo, I could've taken him." He puffs out his chest at Freya, leers a little.

Freya sees a couple of classes he took when he was twelve or so, an instructor, frustrated, telling him he has absolutely no balance at all, and smiles at him. "Thank you for your time, Matt," she says, "We'll call you if you need anything," and keeps smiling, pointedly, until Matt takes the hint and leaves, closing the door behind him.

"Is he lying?" Brendan says, distractedly. His arm is stretched out, reaching for something beneath the bed, mind a hum of _almost got it_ and _damn, this floor is hard on my knees_ and _oh god, I sound like my dad_.

"No, he was telling the truth," Freya says. "All he knows is that Johannsen turned left when he left the building, in the direction of the subway, and that this top lets him see my breasts. All of which may be true, but it's not much use to us."

"No, but this might be," Brendan says. He stands up, holding something gingerly between thumb and forefinger before dropping it into a plastic evidence bag. It's a tube of lipstick, expensive-looking, like the kind Freya remembers her mother using, and Brendan doesn't have to open it for her to know what colour it is.

She looks up at him, and he's grinning, the wide curve of his mouth open and triumphant. "It's him, Freya. It's him, we got him."

* * *

Of course they don't have him, not yet; they have nothing more than a single piece of circumstantial evidence, an assumed name and the image of a man that Freya pulled from the mind of a bored, disinterested teenager. But it's more than they had before, and somehow, things start to move. Brendan's progress reports arrive on Harper's desk earlier and earlier each day, full of more and more material—sightings, possible IDs, people who've seen things, people whose silence is suspicious—and Brendan becomes even more focused on the case.

There are late nights in the office, in her apartment, in his. Brendan's right about the size of his apartment, Freya discovers soon enough: she frowns when she first sees it, because it's a tiny one bedroom walk-up, much smaller than he should be able to afford on an NSA wage, and it seems so very neat, so pared down, even with the over-flowing bookcases that line the walls, the photographs arranged in rows on the windowsill in the living room. It's Brendan, though, in a way she couldn't explain verbally, a way that only makes sense in her mind, in his, in the way he seems to expand to fit every space once he's here; he's comfortable here.

Comfortable enough that he can get drunk while Freya's there, even though she stays sober; but it's more than that, she realises, when he looks her in the eye. Defences down, dulled by exhaustion and half a bottle of scotch, she can see Brendan see her; the vertigo that makes her feel is partly due to the comfort he takes in her presence, and a little to the implicit trust she realises he has in her.

Few people who know Freya well trust her anymore; even fewer trust themselves around her.

Later still, when the alcohol's worn off and she's drinking coffee in an attempt to stay awake, Brendan reaches out to hold her hand. He's writing with one hand, taking notes on something, a rough staccato in black ink across a pad of paper; the other curls around her free hand, briefly, the brush of fingertips against her palm, and she feels gun calluses, and the way the pads of his fingers are worn smooth from typing.

* * *

Five years with the NSA has taught Freya that most cases end in an anticlimax—lines of code untangled that point to a single, anonymous Swiss bank account; secrets that people thought they could hide, even from themselves; single gunshots and crumpled bodies. This case is no different—Arthur Wayne, or Mark Johannsen, or the man who has murdered at least three dozen women, is sitting quietly in a twin room in a Holiday Inn just outside Cincinnati when they burst in on him. The small portable tv is turned to the Food Network, and Rachael Ray giggles in the background while he lets them arrest him without a murmur; he holds out his hands to be cuffed, his khakis are neatly pressed, and the only remarkable thing about him is the small suitcase sitting on the other side of the room, the one that carries dozens of knives and hundreds of tubes of lipstick, all the same colour.

It's a miserable day in April, rain making the asphalt slick, turning all the ground to mud and the sky to grey slate; Brendan and Freya stand together in it, watching as Wayne is placed in the police car and driven away. Someone, one of the observers who's been sent out from Washington, says "Good job, Agent Dean. Agent McAllister" as he passes, slapping Brendan on the shoulder and smiling tightly at Freya. Brendan's mind reflects hers—happiness and elation, the tumbling, cartwheeling bright burst of _thank god thank god thank god_, because they've caught him, they've stopped him, there will be no more. Brendan's tired, too, a little giddy and full of adrenaline; his defences are gone but his feelings are the same, she can tell that they're more—and Freya looks up at him, at the grin on his face that's big enough to make all the world brighter, and thinks that maybe the only reason she didn't realise this before was that she hadn't wanted to look.

The others leave in a convoy of sober government-issue cars and sirens, flashing lights muted by the rain. Brendan watches them leave, smile still written broad on his face; and Freya catches him by the wrist and leans up to kiss him, giving in to the impulse to taste the way joy mingles with rainwater on his mouth. He freezes against her for a moment, breath stutter-starting against her lips. "Freya?" he says softly, the look on his face just a little wary, a little disbelieving; and she says "Yes," and wills him to read her as easily as she can him.

She's never seen his thoughts shift colour, change texture, as quickly as they do when she says that: one simple syllable and he wraps his arms around her, picks her up right there in the middle of the parking lot and kisses her breathless, kisses her until she can breathe again, her fingers twined in his hair and his big hands cradling her. He only lets her go when a car drives past on the road and honks at them; she buries her face in his shoulder and laughs, breathing in the smell of wet wool and _Brendan_. His laughter is shakier, but it's real, his arms are warm around her, and he presses kisses against her hair, her temple, and says "We did it, Freya, we did it."

_Yes_, she thinks. _Yes, we did_.


End file.
